Reviews
David Nice
Ian Page’s “journey of a lifetime” with his Mozartists, taking the greatest genius year by year, lands us in 1773 with the adolescent Mozart's first durable crowdpleaser, the pretty-brilliant motet for soprano and orchestra Exsultate, jubilate (last night was its 250th anniversary). The boy wonder still needs annual support from his elders, though, and as usual we got more than just a sampler of what else was going on musically in that year.Page’s scholarly but performance-vivid planning gave us a first half which was a kind of Sturm und Drang sandwich – vivid, angular products of that style Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“Stupid, dumb and thick” was how Jackie Stewart felt he was characterised at school in Dunbartonshire, and it wasn’t until he was 43 that he was diagnosed as being severely dyslexic. By that time he’d won the Formula One World Championship three times, become a popular sports commentator for ABC television and thrown himself into the role of globe-trotting ambassador for the Ford Motor Company.The scion of a family garage business, he’d also become one of the world’s wealthiest sportsmen. But, as he confesses in this fascinating documentary, he’d spent much of his life terrified that the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In this glittering era of global streaming, the viewer is constantly bombarded with the latest and most sensational TV drama from South Korea, Australia, Denmark, California etcetera. But Huddersfield’s own Sally Wainwright continues to show most of the competition a clean pair of heels.Scott & Bailey, Last Tango in Halifax and Gentleman Jack notwithstanding, it’s Happy Valley which is liable to be remembered as her crowning achievement, and this long-anticipated third and final series is steadily tightening its grip as it reaches the halfway mark. The BBC’s seemingly counter-intuitive Read more ...
David Nice
This multimedia horror revue gave me heart trouble, which is an odd kind of compliment. Not at first: the assault of abrasive music, the one singer having to leap all over the place vocally, competing with spoken word and information overload, can seem self-defeating. And that vile word “lobotomy” is enough in itself to trigger a panic attack. But ultimately the impact is powerful, unforgettable, in tune with great artistic statements about the human condition.Least Like the Other’s creative team have been selective about the supposedly limited details we now have concerning the tragic life Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A first encounter with Rustic Hinge and the Provincial Swimmers is unforgettable. Their summer 1970 recordings are so far out they at first seem unlistenable. Persistence pays though and the ear tunes in. It becomes clear this band swallowed the Captain Beefheart playbook and regurgitated it after applying a severe dose of the cut-up technique.Despite sending a letter which generated the interest of Beefheart fan John Peel, who wanted to add them to the roster of his Dandelion Records label, Rustic Hinge and Co were close-to unnoticed. There was a January 1971 mention in the underground Read more ...
David Nice
Haydn and Mozart symphonies from John Eliot Gardiner and his English Baroque Soloists are bound, at the very least, to be high, lucid and bright. Last night the X-factor was there too, and trebled in a surely unsurpassable account of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for violin, viola and orchestra by two of the world’s most communicative soloists, Isabelle Faust and Antoine Tamestit.There was amazement even as early as the opening orchestral ensemble here, Faust and Tamestit joining their fellow violinists and viola-players and acting as two more conductors to bring a crescendo to a climax even Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
First came Yasmina Reza’s 1994 long-runner Art; now another French hit, The Art of Illusion, has arrived after eight years in Paris. The two pieces couldn’t be more different: the former is a chatty spat between three sophisticated male friends (would producers use gender-fluid casting these days?); the new arrival, a larky, boisterous ensemble piece that plays with the theme of illusion and how much it contributes to what we have come to call “magic”.Thematically it’s stretched a little thin at times, but as a performance it’s a tonic. Its writer, Alexis Michalik, juggles three different Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Perhaps Michael Haneke led the way with The Piano Teacher. But it’s still surprising to find a film set in the rarefied world of classical music that can be taut and mysterious, while dealing with such urgent contemporary issues as workplace abuse and cancel culture, and introducing one of the most complex, compelling film characters in years.But in just his third film in 20 years, writer/director Todd Field has achieved all of this, and more. Whatever you think you know about Tár, whatever boxes the film might seem to occupy, forget it. This is a slippery, sly piece of work, whose bold Read more ...
Gary Naylor
It’s a long way from the dank chill of an English winter to the stultifying heat of a New Orleans summer, but we’ve been here before at this venue. Five years on from their award-winning Summer And Smoke, Rebecca Frecknall is back in the director’s chair and Patsy Ferran in the lead role for Tennessee Williams’ exploration of frailty and fear, A Streetcar Named Desire. The play (or, perhaps, the movie) has achieved the ultimate mark of iconic status, its very own parody episode in The Simpsons, so even those who have see neither version of this slice of Southern Noir will have Read more ...
Robert Beale
Nicola Benedetti and Sir Mark Elder are both in the enviable position of being able to take audiences with them into music territory that might scare some away. So it was a gratifyingly near-capacity house that heard Szymanowski’s Second Violin Concerto last night as – on the first occasion they have worked together – they presented it to the Hallé audience.It’s long been a favourite of gifted solo violinists, because of its combination of folk-style energy and lyricism (and the cadenza movement, which was written by its first soloist Pawel Kochański and divides the work roughly in two, Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The obstacles that have faced Noah Max in the five years since he resolved to make an opera of John Boyne’s Holocaust novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas would have stymied someone less determined. Not just the usual fundraising and logistical challenges that every opera has to deal with, but also Covid – and the demand from the story’s rights holder for £1 million for their permission.This was amended down to a manageable amount after the public involvement of, among others, the Jewish Chronicle, and so the project has finally reached fruition in a sold out two night run at the Cockpit Read more ...
David Nice
Amanda Majeski pushed the boundaries as Janáček's tormented heroine for director Richard Jones at the Royal Opera. Here there were confines – no “concert staging” this, but a laissez-faire affair with scores and music stands, occasionally obscuring the stage directions – but she still conveyed the essence in front of Simon Rattle’s throbbing, luminous London Symphony Orchestra and flanked by other cast members of uniform excellence.Not for Majeski the composer’s definition of Russian playwright Ostrovsky’s Katya – the opera is performed in Czech, of course, but the LSO gives the Russian Read more ...